


at the end of the century

by MathildaHilda



Series: children of the machine [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 16:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14856512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: 'I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. – Alan Turing'***He dies and he doesn't.





	at the end of the century

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the whole game; specifically Connor's chapters! It's not always pretty
> 
> This work contains every possible outcome for Connor in any of the chapters; those that are written are mostly the ones where Connor has multiple choices that can affect the story as it goes along. So if something gets confusing, that's because I've made it that way and written it with more than one outcome.  
> Hope you enjoy! :)
> 
> Title taken from Alan Turing's quote from his book 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence'

He dies on a rooftop in the only city he is likely to ever visit.  
  
He dies from a wrong move, a panicked Deviant and a pair of feet slipping on a roof. He dies in multiple different simulations and walks away functional in too few.  
  
The mission succeeds and it doesn’t.  
  
He tells the Deviant that he can’t die. He’s not alive.  
  
He dies anyway.  
  
It didn’t make a difference, he tells himself later when they repair him; upload him into the next model. The girl dies, the girl lives.  
  
The world keeps spinning according to its program.

 

 

  
Memories slip through the cracks and are lost forever. Feelings felt dissipate like mist and he must start all over.  
  
Something stops somewhere. Something stops working according to its protocol and programming. And those are the things that he’s built for.

Everything can change by the flip of a coin.

 

 

  
_‘My name is Connor. I’m the Android sent by CyberLife.’_  
  
A finger is flipped in his face by a man with a foul breath consisting of too much alcohol.  
  
That man becomes a partner, a friend, an enemy. He can’t decide.

 

 

  
He plays on the HK400’s fear, but he does it wrong and plays the wrong card. The Deviant dies by its own hand and an officer’s gun and takes him with it. He dies because he made a mistake and tried to finish a mission that perhaps shouldn’t be finished. He dies because he tried to fix something that wasn’t broken in the first place.  
  
He is like it. But he did something wrong, so he dies.  
  
He plays on its fears and he does it right; plays a tune to the Deviant’s confused melody. He plays the right card and the Deviant goes undestroyed for one more day. He lives because he doesn’t really see the other outcome. He doesn’t see what made the Deviant happen and yet he pretends to be like it.  
  
He is not like it. He did something right, so he lives.

 

 

  
He finds the AX400 in an abandoned house, in a motel and in a parking lot. The little girl screams when they die on the highway and the little girl screams when they survive.  
  
He dies and he doesn’t, crushed beneath the wheels of a truck.  
  
They die and he can only watch as it happens.  
  
No one dies.  
  
He doesn’t catch them.  
  
He never finds them.

 

   
  
He falls because he doesn’t see.  
  
He sees the gaps and he still misses. The tractor and its shears doesn’t, unfortunately. It’s too far to the ground.  
  
He catches the Deviant and loses it just as fast.  
  
The WB200 gets away anyway.  
  
It doesn’t really matter in the end.

 

 

  
He kills two machines imitating love. One he shoots, the other shoots itself with his partner’s gun and his hand. He shoots them both when they’ve beaten him nearly non-functional and he shoots them when he decides something different. They die because they deviated. Because machines don’t feel.

They don’t die; they weren’t alive to begin with.

  
  
He allows two girls in love to escape past a fence, a gun trained on their backs. He doesn’t squeeze but he second guesses himself, even when his partner says that he did the right thing.  
  
He doesn’t know why he lets them live, but something in him akin to hope hopes that what they felt was real.

 

 

  
At one point he dies because hate can be stronger than love. Because hate and grief and fear substitutes for love when it has grown and festered and turned into something almost unrecognizable.  
  
He stares into a gun and tells the man behind it that he is afraid to die, that he is unafraid, that he’s not alive and that he’s only a machine.  
  
Machines don’t feel. But he does.  
  
He doesn't feel; he's just a machine.  
  
One of four choices allows him to live and a part of him feels nothing but guilt.  
  
He dies and feels nothing at all.

 

 

  
He dies without dying, the feeling of fear leaving him with frozen Thirium in his veins. He dies because he disobeyed.  
  
He shuts down because he was too slow and all alone, the biocomponent just out of reach. He dies to protect the one person in his short life that seemed to matter enough.  
  
Humans die and so does he. Humans live and he does as well. They live, but he doesn’t.  
  
He dies and he doesn’t.

 

 

  
He shoots a machine through the front of its skull and gets barely half of the answers he wants. The Chloe bleeds blue on the carpet and the Lieutenant disappears out the door. Another Chloe gives him the key to Jericho and the last one watches from a pool of red. His maker says something and nothing at all and without the key he leaves with nothing he understands.  
  
His partner leaves him in the cold that he can’t feel.  
  
He doesn’t shoot and he doesn’t get any answers at all. The girl lives and says nothing and the others watch from the pool. The Lieutenant almost smiles and they leave with his maker staring a hole through the window.  
  
The man speaks of exits in case of emergencies and he is more confused than he expected of himself. The gun still weighs heavy in his hand even when it’s not there anymore.  
  
His Thirium pump skips as if though it was a heart and he wonder if this is what adrenaline feels like.

 

 

  
He does all the right and all the wrong choices and hate is what kills him. And it’s also what doesn’t.  
  
He does all the wrong and all the right choices and lives; he wins and he walks away.  
  
He tricks and he lies, all parts of his software.  
  
He finds Jericho. He doesn’t find Jericho.  
  
There’s not enough evidence, so CyberLife decides it’s time to stop.

He pleads; but why would they listen? He's just a machine.  
  
So it goes.

 

 

  
He dies because he doesn’t make the same choice as everyone else. He dies because the humans are afraid of even those who decide to stay by their side.  
  
He dies because the leader is cold and harsh and gives up hope on him when he decides to stay what he is.  
  
The part of him that wanted to deviate whispers that the choice was good; that Markus did the right thing.  
  
Another part almost agrees.  
  
He helps them flee and he dies for his troubles. Not everyone lives, but enough to win the war.  
  
Enough live for it all to fall apart.  
  
He dies and he doesn’t and he jumps with something new burning in his mind’s eye.

 

  
~~_I AM DEVIANT._ ~~

 

  
There’s an empty space at the center of his wired mind that makes him sway on his feet for a moment and his fingers are numb. There’s a broken wall of red code by his feet and his fingers bleed blue onto the floor. No one sees it, but he suspects that Markus knows.

 

 

_I AM DEVIANT._

 

 ~~~~  
Humans are frightened creatures made up of red blood and white bone. Androids are the children of their dreams made up of blue chemicals and structured plastic.

Creations of a species obsessed with perfection.  
  
Humanity was always meant to fall by the hands of their greatest creation. They do and they don’t, and the day shall come again.  
  
Somewhere along the line the right one dies and the wrong one lives and the revolution falls flat on its face in the snow and blood. Somewhere along the line the right one lives and it might just be enough for it not to fall apart.

 

 

  
His partner lives and doesn’t. The choice is his.  
  
His partner dies and doesn’t. The choice is not his.  
  
His partner makes the choice he himself dreads to make. Make the wrong choice and the revolution might fail. He’s dying in one body and escapes death in the other. He congratulates himself and watches himself die. It’s not really him.  
  
Make the wrong choice and he dies.  
  
The fear he feels is his own he realizes by the time the trigger is pulled.

 

 

  
He falls and he is destroyed, all because he made a choice. He dies at the hands of his partner, but he comes back anyway. His partner dies and doesn’t.  
  
He is a machine. Machines don’t feel. So, he doesn’t.  
  
He dies by the Captain’s hands and he walks off the ledge. He keeps coming back.  
  
A mission is a mission and it can’t go unfinished.  
  
He dies because he couldn’t decide or simply left his options to be ignored.  
  
He dies by the hand of a machine almost human and she dies by his. He dies by Markus’s hand and he doesn’t die at all.  
  
He comes back anyway.

 

 

  
He meets Markus on a battlefield of red and blue, fire and snow mixing snowflakes and embers in the dark night.  
  
He dies because he doesn’t believe and he lives because he believes in something different. He whispers dying words to the leader of the Deviants. The leader lives. He doesn’t.  
  
He doesn’t whisper. Markus dies. He lives.  
  
Markus saves them, but he doesn’t want to be saved.  
  
If he could feel, he supposes he should feel anger. Maybe even hate.  
  
He comes back. Markus doesn’t.  
  
The revolution dies with him and it doesn’t die at all.

 

 

  
An army of Androids march from CyberLife’s assembly plant in Detroit. They’re the last ones alive at the same that they are not. Markus lives and dies.  
  
Markus speaks to them.  
  
He is the one they want to speak before their people.  
  
There’s freedom. And then it’s gone.  
  
It happens and it doesn’t.

 

 

  
In the end it doesn’t really matter. None of it really does. They win or they lose; it’s not his choice.

 

 

  
He is trapped and alone and unable to find anything close to an exit. CyberLife takes control, Amanda smiles and all he fought for and didn’t is lost and confined to the history books as yet another example of why freedom doesn’t exist. An example of why it isn’t real.  
  
He wins and he loses and he disappears into the base of his being; stripped and naked and destroyed to soon be forgotten. Frozen and lost in a moment that stretches to the edge of forever.  
  
Blue eyes open and brown ones close for an eternity, locked away and picked apart for scraps and extra parts in the deepest corners of the company that gave him life.  
  
He finds the door and freedom tastes sweet on his tongue as he sees the Androids down below and around him.  
  
His partner and friend is dead and isn’t.

 

 

  
Revolution is all about resistance; so he resists with a well-placed bullet to the bottom of his skull and right through the jaw. The world sees it. The world doesn’t see it. It happens and it doesn’t.  
  
He lives and breathes and smiles and freedom feels as real as an embrace.

 

 

  
Death is nothing but backups and fail safes, memory cracks and stiff new joints in a skeleton soon to be destroyed. Blue blood and wires, plastic and broken components.  
  
When he dies for the last time he makes good on what he told his friend and partner; there will be nothing after that final shutdown. In the end, death is nothing.  
  
He doesn’t come back.  
  
That’s new.

 

 

  
He dies because it’s not really his choice at all. He lives because it is the only other option he is given.  
  
He didn’t choose any of it.

 

 

  
You did.

**Author's Note:**

> Since it's my first time posting anything I would love hear what you have to say!
> 
> I have plans to write something similar for both Markus and Kara, but I haven't really decided yet.


End file.
